Historically, tank specializations have been somewhat problematic for PvP balance. Taking a character designed to soak massive hits from raid bosses and putting them in front of other players poses some very difficult challenges. If they’re able to put out enough damage to be a threat, they become unstoppable. If not, enemy players can just ignore them. We’ve seen some limited success with tank specs as flag carriers in Rated Battlegrounds, but even that has proven problematic.

However, the class and systems changes coming in Warlords of Draenor are giving us an opportunity to try a different approach. With Vengeance gone, tanks are able to deal much more damage than previously. It’ll still be a little behind a true DPS spec, but thanks to the increased player health pools and healer changes, PvP is much less reliant on heavy burst damage. Sustained damage output can still be quite threatening.

We feel that that increase in damage will make tanks quite dangerous in PvP, but as they still need to survive those massive swings in PvE, their ability to soak damage would be too much. To that end, in an upcoming beta build, we’ll be trying out a debuff that increases tank damage taken by 25% from other players. It’s important to understand that this is not an attempt to make tank specs inviable in PvP. Quite the opposite – it’s just one part of an overall strategy that, if successful, will make tank specs a reasonable choice, even in situations where there isn’t a flag to carry or node to defend.

Our hope is that we can get tank specs to a point where they take a little less damage than other specs (but not so much less that it’s problematic), and, as a tradeoff, deal a little less damage than other specs (but not so much less that they’re not a threat). It’s definitely an experiment, and one that’s going to take a lot of iteration and testing. We may even decide to take a different approach entirely. But we think it’ll be pretty cool if it works, so we’re going to give it a try. Let us know what you think!

Do gladiator stance prot warriors fall into this category since are technically in tank spec?

Not sure yet! That's something we'll be looking at in testing. I believe the debuff will be applied in this first bit of testing, but again, we'll be iterating on this a LOT, so that could easily change if it doesn't end up feeling like the right answer.

Please keep tanks out of arena brackets. It is incredibly unfun for the majority of the playerbase. To throw out a buzzword the gameplay is "toxic".

So, here's the thought process: Yes, fighting *against* tanks is not fun right now, on live.

On live, our solution has been "Tanks, stay out of PvP, for the most part." That's fine for the non-tanks; they don't end up having unfun fights against tanks. However, for the tanks, it's really disappointing.

In Warlords, we want to try to find a solution that keeps it fun for the non-tanks, and lets tanks PvP. Tanks no longer have massively more CC than the DPS. They're already going to be tuned to do somewhat less damage than the DPS, with Vengeance removed. The remaining thing that's unfun about them is how invincible they are; we want to try to solve that.

Feedback from players is going to be instrumental in this process, and we're going to have to iterate on the solution, I expect. There are going to be some players who just see a tank in PvP and have an immediate gut reaction of "ew, go away"; that's not the feedback we're going to be looking for. We're going to be looking for the feedback from people who give it a real try, and share "OK, this is the problem, this is the part I find aggravating, here's the issue with how they fit into the metagame, etc."

TL;DR: We want to make tanks fun to play and fight against in PvP, and we're going to need your help to reach that goal.

Hard to test out tanks in PVP when they are so broken right now. Unkillable gods of destruction.

So hey, about that...

We discovered a teeny tiny little issue with the Battle Fatigue debuff. Turns out, it was set to increase tank damage taken by -25%. Yes, that's an increase of negative 25%... which means that Battle Fatigue was actually reducing the damage tank-specced characters were taking.

This should now be fixed on Beta servers, which should make quite a difference. Let us know how things feel now.